Thursday, 6 October 2016

Ash Carter's nuclear plans

Ashton
Carter outlines plans for nuclear war with Russia at North Dakota
missile base

US
Defense Secretary Ashton Carter delivered a speech to "missileers"
at the Air Force Global Strike Command base in Minot, North Dakota
Monday, defending the massive modernization of the US nuclear arsenal
and issuing bellicose threats against Russia.

Carter's
trip to Minot was the first he has taken to a nuclear missile base
since becoming secretary of defense in February 2015. It coincided
with the steady escalation of conflicts pitting the US against
nuclear-armed Russia and China that threaten to ignite a new world
war.

The thrust of Carter's speech was a defense of
the Pentagon's proposed $348 billion plan to rebuild Washington's
so-called nuclear triad of strategic bombers, missiles and
submarines. Estimates are that over a 30-year period, this nuclear
buildup will siphon fully $1
trillion out
of the American economy.

Delivered to the officers
and enlisted personnel tasked with launching Minuteman III
intercontinental ballistic missiles, each carrying warheads with 60
times the destructive capacity of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945, the speech at times seemed to echo the title of the
satiric 1964 filmDr.
Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the
Bomb.

This
massive US death machine, Carter insisted, provided "the bedrock
of security" that has "enabled millions and millions to get
up in the morning to go to school, to go to work, to live their
lives, to dream their dreams and to give their children a better
future."

He went on to predict that "given
what we see in today's security environment, it's also likely that
our children and their children will probably have to live in a world
where nuclear weapons exist." In
reality, assuming the continuation of the present "security
environment" and the continued existence of nuclear weapons,
there is good reason to fear that the world will be incinerated in
the lifetimes of "our children and their children."

While
using the anodyne Pentagon jargon of "our nuclear enterprise"
to refer to the US nuclear war arsenal, Carter's speech contained
passages hinting at the undeniable fact that the threat of a nuclear
conflagration is now greater than at any time since the height of the
Cold War.

He warned that while "in the more
than seven decades since 1945, nuclear weapons have not again been
used in war, that's not something we can ever take for granted."

He
added: "In today's security environment, one that's dramatically
different from the last generation, and certainly the generation
before that, we face a nuclear landscape that continues to pose
challenges...that continues to evolve, in some ways less predictably
than during the Cold War, even though many around the world and even
some in the United States are stuck in the Cold War in their
thinking."

What
has changed in the wake of the Cold War and the Stalinist
bureaucracy's dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991 is the eruption
of American militarism, based on the conviction of the US ruling
establishment that, with the demise of the USSR, it could freely
employ its military might in a bid to assert world hegemony and
reverse the global economic decline of American capitalism.

The
wars fought over the last quarter century, particularly in the Middle
East, have produced a series of debacles and a world historic
catastrophe for the peoples of the region. At the same time, they
have metastasized into broader conflicts pitting the US ever more
directly against Russia and China.

In a press
conference after his speech, Carter gave vent to the mounting
frustration in Washington over the failure of its five-year-old proxy
war for regime change in Syria. This has taken the form of ever more
hysterical denunciations of Russia for "war crimes"—this
from a government responsible for well over a million deaths in the
region.

"What's
going on now in Syria is tragic, disgraceful, preventable, and—as I
think everyone around the world has been emphasizing over the
weekend—Russia and the Syrian regime bear responsibility for the
violence, particularly against civilians," Carter told the
media.

The
real concern in Washington is not the loss of civilian lives, but
rather the prospect that the Syrian government, backed by Russian
airpower, is on the verge of overrunning east Aleppo, one of the last
bastions of the Al Qaeda-affiliated militias that constitute the main
fighting force in the US-orchestrated war for regime
change.

Attacking
Russia in his speech, Carter said: "Moscow's recent saber
rattling and building of new nuclear weapons systems raises serious
questions about its leaders' commitment to strategic stability, their
regard for long-established abhorrence of using nuclear weapons and
whether they respect the profound caution that Cold War-era leaders
showed with respect to brandishing nuclear weapons."

The
Obama administration, which recently signaled its decision to abandon
even the Democratic president's pretense of renouncing a nuclear
first strike as official US policy, has attempted to portray Russia
as responsible for igniting a new nuclear arms race. Given that
Russia's military budget is little more than one-tenth that of the
US, and less than that of Washington's closest Arab ally, Saudi
Arabia, this amounts to an absurd pretext.

The
nuclear saber rattling is being carried out by the US government, and
Carter's trip to Minot was part of it.

The defense
secretary described the nuclear bombers and missiles as a force that
served to "enable" US troops "to accomplish their
conventional missions around the world."

"As
you know, they're standing with our NATO allies and standing up to
Russia's aggression in Europe," he said, referring as well to US
operations in "the vital Asia-Pacific region," "deterring
North Korea's provocations" and "countering Iran's malign
activities in the Middle East."

Referring to
the relentless US-NATO military buildup against Russia, Carter
declared: "Across the Atlantic, we're refreshing NATO's nuclear
playbook to better integrate conventional and nuclear deterrence to
ensure we plan and train like we'd fight and to deter Russia from
thinking it can benefit from nuclear use in a conflict with NATO,
from trying to escalate to de-escalate, as some there call it."

The
US and its NATO allies are deploying thousands of troops on Russia's
western border and have created a 40,000-strong rapid reaction force
in preparation for war. The stated commitment to "integrate
conventional and nuclear" forces in this effort has placed the
threat of nuclear war on a hair trigger.

Last
week, the Russian news agency Tass quoted the commander of Russia's
Strategic Missile Force, Sergey Karakayev, as reporting that the
latest Yars mobile ballistic missile systems are being deployed to
the Tver region, the country's westernmost ICBM command. Moscow
is carrying out the deployment in response to Washington's
positioning of an antimissile defense system in Romania and plans to
set up similar batteries in Poland. While the US pretext is that the
systems are directed against Iran, which has no nuclear weapons,
Moscow sees the deployments as an attempt to make a first strike
against Russia more feasible.
It also charges that the ABM systems can easily be converted to fire
short- and medium-range offensive nuclear missiles.

In
his speech Monday, Carter also made a brief reference to a Pentagon
effort to boost morale among the military personnel assigned to
launch a nuclear war, saying it was "bearing fruit." In
2013 and 2014, over 100 officers and enlisted personnel at nuclear
bases were implicated in a scandal involving drug abuse, cheating on
proficiency tests and gross security violations. The nuclear war
command also saw a series of top officers removed from their
posts.

The claim of improved morale was called into
question, however, with the court martial in June of one member of
the security forces at the F.E. Warren nuclear missile base in
Wyoming on charges of using and distributing the hallucinogenic drug
LSD. Fourteen other airmen have been suspended for suspected drug use
there.

1 comment:

If a real nuclear war took place with Russia, the oligarchy would suffer unacceptable capital losses. Money is the only language that they understand. They run the show, and they will not permit it.

The US military is a paper tiger and can only beat small defenseless countries. The top brass knows this. They will not actually go to war (first strike) with a country capable of defending itself. Especially not Russia.

Russia knows all of this. They also know that they only need to bide their time and the US will fall on it's own.

What to make of all of this bluster? My conjecture is that is is all bluff to frighten the US voters.